Quotes About Experience

Pathos is sad and inspires pity, but is not very interesting because there is nothing to learn from it; the audience experiences mostly pity and futility.

Much better he should read for the first half of his life and then live for the next half. That's the proper sequence to know what you're doing. Nowadays, they start off by living and never get around to reading – it explains the mess we're all in.

Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.

He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on a map, it was, in truth, another time—another country.

I've never travelled," I told her. "Oh, you absolutely should," she insisted, "if only so that you can come home and really see it for what it is. That's my favourite part.

You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

Sleep isn't a skill." I laughed at him. "But of course, señorita. The innocent have it. They're born with it. Somehow you lose it as you age. Worry steals it away.

On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. More than anyone I'd known, Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.

Places change us, don't they? Sometimes more than we can even guess.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

The surrender in it seemed to have cut new lines around his brown eyes.

The games had prepared Ruta for his future, and should have prepared me for mine, too. The manoeuvres had become riskier and more difficult, but maybe each was the same when you got down to it. Jumping had taught me how to jump, hadn't it? I only had to look at Ruta to know he wasn't a child any more. Neither was I. The

After a year of fumbling and embarrassing encounters with Jock, I was finally learning what sex was, and that I liked it. Boy would come into my cottage at night and wake me by roughly pressing against me, his hands everywhere before I was fully conscious.

real business of what it meant to live in those time periods came alive for

During an interview; Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. "You know, there's a line at the end of my book that goes, 'This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.' That's something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don't get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That's an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.

He's never been a throwaway kid. Never experienced the world in a woman's body, or a girl's. Never had a reason to confuse love with suffering.

On the street, it was dark in the way only Africa can be.

The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me, and it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it. Barely

Long ago Corolla told me that it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.